For those along the Gold Coast who have looked up from the daily struggles of living in a collapsing economy long enough to read the news, you realize that food—the stuff you put on your plate–is going to be, well, in the news more and more in the future.
The reasons are many, as always, but the drought hitting the Corn Belt of the US is a prime factor. Turns out the golden grain is found in something like 70% of the food products on supermarket shelves, often in forms we may not recognize.
In a transcontinental exchange on the looming food crisis with an old friend in Europe, he remarked, “For the human race, what is lacking is not sufficient food, but sufficient wisdom.” In editorial deference to the sarcastic musings of Mose Allison quoted above, I’d delete “wisdom” and replace it with “common sense.”
As that other great cynical observer of human nature, Mark Twain, once observed, “Common sense is a very uncommon thing.” Now there’s a statement you can take to the bank. For the sake of illustration, let’s pull an example out of the ‘inbox’ of miscellaneous news on the wire as I write.
The state of Oklahoma, the starting point for the westward migration of poor farmers that set the stage for John Steinbeck’s novel, The Grapes of Wrath, is, once again, suffering a prolonged drought that is affecting 100% of the counties in this largely agricultural state. Ironically, Their man in Washington, Senator James Inhofe recently wrote arguing that his own climate change denial—and voting record–is biblically inspired “…because only God can change the climate.”
On the other hand, when it comes to campaign fundraising, the senior senator from Oklahoma doesn’t just pray to the heavens and wait for the manna to miraculously appear. Au contraire. Between 2007 and 2012 Inhofe received just over $500,000 from oil and gas companies. His voting record in Congress would appear to confirm that he knows very well which side his manna is buttered on. He has been one of the staunchest opponents to any form of legislation directed at measuring or reducing the carbon emissions likely to bring the ‘grapes of wrath’ back to his home state in permanent fashion.
In the case of Senator Inhofe, the words of the muckraking author Upton Sinclair come to mind, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on not understanding it.” But, one wonders, what about the voters in Oklahoma who continue to keep this guy in office?
What’s the ‘common-sense quotient’ of a bunch of people who are simultaneously able to bear witness to their home drying up and blowing away and yet not doing a thing to prevent it?
Here, please forgive me if I don’t subject the esteemed reader to that common literary device of posing a question only to pull the rabbit out of the hat with an omniscient response. In this case, the answer is far too complex, but it at least set’s the stage for some pertinent observations that have been made over the course of the years.
Depending on your political perspective you can identify which of the recent occupants of the Oval Office best fulfilled this prediction:
“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.” - H.L. Mencken
As far as I can tell, the ‘plain folks of the land’ have been dumbed down, mesmerized and rendered increasingly impervious to complex rational thought –and social activism–far more than in the age of Mencken.
The 20th century produced two conflicting visions as to how ‘thought control’ would be accomplished in the future. In the novel 1984, George Orwell warned that we would become subjected to an externally imposed oppression— something like North Korea, or like we have seen revolts against in the ongoing ‘Arab Spring’ uprisings. But in Aldous Huxley’s vision, fleshed out in Brave New World, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore and become addicted to the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
As Neil Postman put it, “People of a television culture need “plain language” both aurally and visually…the Gettysburg Address would probably have been largely incomprehensible to a 1985 audience.”
Surprisingly enough, the legendary TV anchorman and reporter magna cum laude, Walter Cronkite, lobbied long, hard and unsuccessfully for an hour-long network news format. As he put it, “ A functioning democracy is incompatible with the voters receiving the majority of their information on the issues, condensed into the sound bites of a half hour format.”
I distinctly recall a literacy study in the US, before I moved to Costa Rica almost 20 years ago that proclaimed 50% of the US populace to be functionally illiterate. “Literacy” was defined as being able to read an article and then summarize the 3 or 4 main points. Notwithstanding the much-lauded achievements of Costa Rica’s educational system, I would have to say ditto for here. For back up, I can remember an article in La Nacion on the 4-6 hour daily average in front of the ‘boob tube’. They referred to a study that documented deleterious effects on attention span, vocabulary development, reading comprehension skills—just the kind of capabilities that voters need to wade through the mountains of mud and piles of BS that characterize political campaigns in ‘modern democracies.’
The techno-entertainment-fantasy steamroller shows no signs of slowing down. Shifting into overdrive is more like it. Campesino families in my neighborhood may awaken with no coffee and sugar, but the cell phones have been recharged with the last 1000 colones available so the kids could amuse themselves with text messaging into the wee hours.
As Huxley predicted, we need no Orwellian Big Brother apparatus to monitor the reading of books. There is no reason to ban a book, for the simple reason that there’s practically no one who wants to read one. With the availability of 24/7 full spectrum infotainment, why, there’s scarcely any time left. Not to mention any interest in stepping back and observing a bit, as Huxley did a half-century ago, just where all this has landed us.
Whether it’s wisdom or common sense, a lot of both used to get handed down, passed along, generation to generation, among both the ‘plain folk’ as well as the literati, in popular sayings and proverbs. These appear to be a near universal facet of culture and many draw from the bygone rural experience of a common agricultural past. Among the many local expressions that have English similes or equivalents you find:
…. Two birds with one stone….
…. Gift horse in the mouth…
…. Early to rise….
…. Chip off the old block….
…. Once bitten twice shy….
…. The squeaky wheel gets the grease…
Codified in “dichos” or proverbs, these snippets of popular wisdom convey a meaning much broader, more relevant to the human condition, than a merely literal interpretation of the few words in each. As to relevance, Aldous Huxley himself remarked, “Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.”
Perhaps nothing could better exemplify the thorough purging of folk wisdom by the onslaught of mass media based culture than the pervasiveness of debt into which so many of us have fallen. Somehow we forgot, or became immune, to the hundreds of warnings issued by philosophers, writers, dramatists and others over the years and are now learning the hard way. To cite just one example among hundreds, Benjamin Franklin:
“Better to go to bed hungry than to wake up in debt.”
While there may not be a magic bullet to restore sanity, wisdom or common sense, another facet of human adaptation to trying moments in life or in history always seems to come in handy: Humor. Early on in the debate about the effects of television, the comedian Groucho Marx wryly observed:
“I think the television is highly educational. When ever someone turns it on, I go into another room and read a book.”
And for those who want to come back at me with the overused canard about misinterpreting citations, I’ll give you one of the best comebacks for disarming an argumentative opponent. As my former philosophy professor, Herbert Marcuse once told me in rejoinder:
“Young man, by its very definition, a quote is something that is taken out of its context.”
You know, when you think about it, that’s kind of of common sense.
Tom Peifer is an ecological land use consultant with 17 years experience in
Guanacaste. 2658-8777. [email protected]
El Centro Verde is dedicated to permaculture and sustainable development. //
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